Two important, linked publications are out today, both carrying the same message: The way we raise poultry in this country is creating an under-appreciated health hazard, and the government structures we depend upon to detect that hazard and protect us from it are failing us.

The two pubs are:

A long piece that will be in the Feb. 2014 edition of Consumer Reports but has been placed online today.

Short version: Independent tests show that multi-drug resistant disease-causing bacteria are widely present on chicken, and the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has insufficient personnel, or legal authority, to change that.

It’s worth emphasizing also that we are right now in the middle of an outbreak of Salmonella on chicken that has been going on for about a year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted an update just this morning: 416 people since since last February, in 23 states and Puerto Rico, 39 percent of them hospitalized, linked to a single producer’s brand of chicken.

A few days ago, the Food and Drug Administration released two important documents related to antibiotic use in livestock raising, and what the results of that antibiotic use are. I’d say that they released them quietly, except, when it comes to this issue, every release seems to be quiet, never accompanied by the press releases or briefings that other divisions of the FDA use to publicize their news.

These two reports capture almost all the data we receive from the federal government about antibiotic use in livestock production (which is not the same thing as “all the data the federal government possesses” — there is evidence they receive more than they release). So their annual release is an important indicator for whether antibiotic use in meat production, and antibiotic resistance in meat, are trending up or down.

A new report is out from the federal collaboration that monitors antibiotic resistance in animals, retail meat and people, and the news is not good.

The full title is the 2010 Retail Meat Report from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System. This report is issued by the Food and Drug Administration; the humans one comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the animals one from the US Department of Agriculture. It reports the results of testing on 5,280 meat samples collected in 2010 in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. (Those are sites of state labs participating in a federal surveillance network, FoodNet, plus one volunteer lab, Maryland.)

The report — which is broken down first by foodborne organism and then by meat type — notes a number of instances where either the percentage of bacteria that are antibiotic resistant, or the complexity of the resistance, is rising. Quoting from the report:

Chicken bought at major supermarkets across Canada is frequently contaminated with superbugs — bacteria that many antibiotics cannot kill — an investigation by CBC TV’s Marketplace has found.

Marketplace researchers — along with their colleagues at Radio-Canada’s food show L’Epicerie — bought 100 samples of chicken from major grocery chains in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal… The 100 samples were sent to a lab for analysis. Two-thirds of the chicken samples had bacteria. That in itself is not unusual — E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter are often present in raw chicken.

What was surprising was that all of the bacteria uncovered during the Marketplace sampling were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Some of the bacteria found were resistant to six, seven or even eight different types of antibiotics.

“This is the most worrisome study I’ve seen of its kind,” said Rick Smith, the head of Environmental Defence, a consumer advocacy group.

I haven’t had time to watch the full program, but no question I think this kind of reporting is worth doing. Nothing brings the threat of agricultural antibiotic use home to people like showing them that resistant bacteria are living on the meat they might have brought home last night.

One important point, though: Don’t think for a moment this is just a Canadian problem.

E. coli from chicken exhibited high rates of resistance to ciprofloxacin (62.5%) followed by lamb/goat (10.9%), pork (15.7%), and beef (27.9%) meat. Resistance to nitrofurantoin dominated in the lamb/goat isolates (60%). Resistance to tetracycline predominated in pork (68.2%) and chicken (62.5%), and resistance to aminoglycosides dominated in lamb/goat meat isolates. S. aureus resistance to clindamycin predominated in lamb/goat isolates (50%), whereas resistance to ciprofloxacin predominated in the pork strains, but no resistance to methicillin was observed. Of the enterococci isolates 21.1% were resistant to vancomycin. High resistance to ampicillin (96%) was observed in Y. enterocolitica and all of the C. jejuni isolates were resistant to ampicillin, cephalothin, and cefuroxime. These results indicate that meat can be a source of resistant bacteria, which could potentially be spread to the community through the food chain.

Oh, but none of those countries are the United States, you say. Then take a look at these:

Those graphics come from a little-read report put out every year by the US Food and Drug Administration as part of its participation in NARMS, the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System that’s shared by the FDA, USDA and CDC. The FDA handles the part of NARMS that looks for resistant bacteria in meat (CDC does human illnesses, USDA does live animals), and the figures above show the percentages of Salmonella and enterococci that were found in retail chicken breasts between 2002 and 2008 (the most recent report) and were resistant to various drugs. The bar along the bottom of each figure shows the major drug classes. So in 2008: 45% of Salmonella on chicken were resistant to tetracycline and 30% to penicillins; among enterococci (common gut bacteria, and therefore common contaminants of meat during slaughtering), 65% resistant to tetracycline and more than 90% to lincosamides, which include the everyday drug clindamycin.

38.2% of chicken breast Salmonella isolates were resistant to ≥ 3 antimicrobial classes in 2008 compared to 51% in ground turkey, an increase in both from previous years. From 2002–2007, multidrug resistance to ≥ 3 antimicrobial classes ranged from 20–34.4% among chicken breast and 20.3–42.6% for ground turkey. More than 15% of chicken breast and ground turkey isolates showed resistance to ≥ 4 classes in 2008.

So, just to underline: Multi-drug resistant superbugs aren’t only on chicken in Canada; if you buy chicken in the United States, they are more than likely on your chicken too.

And whatever country they are occurring in, the solution is the same. Drug-resistant bacteria in food won’t diminish until we reduce the amount of drugs that food animals receive while they are raised.

Update: At Grist’s Meat Wagon, Tom Philpott very kindly points out that I actually broke the news of the latest NARMS report, which I didn’t realize (it was a busy day; see my next post for why). Apparently the report was posted to the FDA web site on Dec. 17, but neither of us can find any evidence that it was publicized, such as a press release on the FDA’s press site. His larger point is important:

We find out from the report that the FDA has been monitoring the situation since 2002 — and finding plenty of antibiotic-resistant strains on meat sold directly to consumers. And they’ve been sharing the information with other leading regulatory/public health agencies — but not so much to the people they’re supposed to be protecting and informing: i.e., us. … six weeks since the FDA report and a year since Sharfstein’s testimony [in 2010, promising scrutiny by the Obama adminsitration – m.], policy hasn’t moved at all. Where are the loud public statements from the FDA trumpeting the fact that our factory farms are cooking up superbugs that make their way to our meat? Where’s the USDA on this topic, which is supposed to protect the public from tainted meat? Where’s CDC?